Legacies

Going up against tradition always poses risks. But when you're the National Ballet, risks become par for the course as Deirdre Kelly pointed out in her review of their production last winter of Romeo and Juliet.

You Don’t Want the Dancing to Stop: National Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/11/you-dont-want-dancing-to-stop-national.html

Guillaume Côté and Elena Lobsanova in  Romeo and Juliet. Photo by Bruce Zinger.

Creating something new from something established and old always poses a challenge. You have tradition to contend with, not to mention people’s expectations. This is perhaps especially true when dealing with a master like Shakespeare as Russian-born choreographer Alexei Ratmansky has done with Romeo and Juliet. 

The former artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, now into his second term as artist in residence of New York’s American Ballet Theater, revisits not only literary tradition but also music and dance history.

A commission to commemorate the 60th anniversary season of the National Ballet of Canada, which is performing the new three-hour work at Toronto’s Four Seasons of the performing through Saturday with alternating casts, Ratmansky’s Romeo and Juliet is a tremendous accomplishment.

The Trials of Roky Erickson

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Sometimes genius is inseparable from madness. Often times though madness can destroy genius - even those who are merely talented. When Will Sheff of Okkervil River "rescued" Roky Erickson (formerly of the psychedelic band 13th Floor Elevators) from oblivion by producing his album True Love Cast Out All Evil, Kevin Courrier examined how.

Songs My Mother Taught Me: Roky Erickson's True Love Cast Out All Evil

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/11/songs-my-mother-taught-me-roky.html

In 1966, the 13th Floor Elevators launched what came to be known as psychedelic rock with their hit single, "You're Gonna Miss Me." It's quite likely that the band's lead singer/songwriter Roky Erickson had no idea that the song's title would end up overshadowing the future that lay ahead of him. I also doubt that given the horrors of what did lay ahead, he (and the legion of fans who followed him) ever considered a day when a record would come out of that experience with the power and emotional force of True Love Cast Out All Evil (released last April). It's one of the strongest and strangely affecting CDs of the year.

For those who miss albums that are conceived as albums (rather than merely a collection of songs), True Love Cast Out All Evil is a beautifully crafted one with a suggestively stirring arc. It's an informal anthropological portrait of an artist trying to re-connect all the broken pieces of memory and truth and finding out how elusive that process can be. Produced by Will Sheff and featuring his band Okkervil River, True Love is a song cycle that attempts to provide a chronicle of a life that has been blasted apart. To his credit, however, Sheff doesn't solemnize the process, nor does he create an inspirational tribute to Erickson's survival. He rather lets Erickson's songs tell the story, an elliptical series of parables about one man testing his faith against an unforgiving world where fate had cast him. Roky Erickson learned his love of music from his mother, a woman who was both religiously devotional and righteously mad. True Love Cast Out All Evil is a haunting evocation of a parent's gift to her son, a present that shares equal portions of inspiration and insanity. (As he says in "Bring Back the Past": "Moody tunes whistle in my ears/And throw me up and down/Dreams and scenes from joy to tears/Could screw me to the ground.")

Liam Neeson: Alpha Male

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

In recent years, Liam Neeson has been curiously remaking himself in the style of an action star which caught the attention of Susan Green in this particular piece.

Where the Wild Things Are: Battling Beasts on the Big Screen

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2012/01/where-wild-things-are-battling-beasts.html

The Grey certainly is a far cry from Never Cry Wolf. In the new thriller, the CGI and animatronic canis lupus creatures are preternaturally immense, relentless carnivores with an appetite for human flesh. The earlier film by Carroll Ballard, which came out in 1983 and was adapted from Farley Mowat’s wonderful 1963 book of the same title, makes the case that wolves feed primarily on rodents. Both movies are in the Arctic adventure genre. The chief distinction may be that the older story is about man learning to understand and coexist with nature while the current release depicts man versus nature in a bloody mismatch.

Yet The Grey, which stars Liam Neeson as the alpha male among a pack of survivors stranded in the vast Alaskan tundra after their transport plane crashes, is a surprisingly meditative saga. As they try to elude the snarling predators by trekking through deep snow without weapons, these guys somehow find time to debate whether or not there is a God. If the answer is yes, we see little evidence that a supreme being is on their side. In addition to the threat of territorial wolves, the men are just as likely to face doom in the form of hypoxia, storms, heights and river rapids amid the beautifully photographed (by Masanobu Takayanagi) vistas of British Columbia, standing in for America’s largest and least populated state.

Summertime Tube

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

When it comes to television, people think of summer as a time of slumming through reruns and waiting for the new fall season. Last year, Mark Clamen in Critics at Large suggested that there's some summer fare to keep you happy until the leaves start to fall.

Beach TV 2011: Franklin & Bash, Suits, and Warehouse 13

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/08/beach-tv-2011-franklin-bash-suits-and.html

If you’ve been spending this summer catching up on all the television you didn’t get the chance to watch during the year, you’ve likely been missing out on new episodes of the best shows currently in production:Breaking Bad on AMC, Curb Your Enthusiasm and True Blood on HBO, and the sublimely brilliant Louie on FX. (And, for our Canadian readers, Showcase has been airing the much anticipated second season of the endlessly original British sci-fi import Misfits since early June.) And there was a lot of serious, dramatic, and important television that aired in the past year.

Leap into Space

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

There was a time when jazz music wasn't as respectable as it is today. On one occasion that took place in New York City, a young horn player named Ornette Coleman introduced an audience to something beyond bop called 'free jazz.' A book about the ensuing war in the crowd was reviewed in Critics at Large by Kevin Courrier.

Throwing Down the Gauntlet – The Battle of the Five Spot: Ornette Coleman and the New York Jazz Field

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2012/01/throwing-down-gauntlet-battle-of-five.html

In the late Fifties, Ornette Coleman, a Texas-born saxophone player who would eventually sojourn to L.A., took a leap into space with a quartet that completely abandoned form when they played jazz. With drummer Billy Higgins, Walter Norris on piano and Don Cherry playing trumpet, The Ornette Coleman Quartet first shook up the jazz world with the aptly titled Something Else!!! The Music of Ornette Coleman (1958). But, by the next LP, when Coleman released The Shape of Jazz to Come, adding Charlie Haden on bass, his blues-based harmonically free improvisations dramatically opened up a whole new direction for the music.

When Coleman then appeared at the Five Spot nightclub in New York in the early winter, he inspired a small riot among jazz artists and critics. This 1959 skirmish would in many ways resemble the much larger one Igor Stravinsky had instigated in 1913 with his radical ballet score Le Sacre du Printemps. Why the commotion? By abandoning harmony on The Shape of Jazz to Come, Coleman had sought rhythm the way abstract expressionist painters went after sensation; that is, through dazzling speed. At the Five Spot, therefore, his melodies were experienced by the audience as if they were swirling in a musical maze, driven by an acceleration of tempo, which challenged these stunned listeners to follow along as he gleefully rejected jazz's adherence to strict time. "It was like I was E.T. or something, just dropped in from the moon," Coleman later recalled.

Found

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Not everyone was left enamoured with the TV series Lost when it finally reached its conclusion, but David Churchill not only hung in, he found good reason to defend it.

TV Series Finale: Lost Lived and Died By Its Characters

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/05/tv-series-finale-lost-lived-and-died-by.html

In the fall of 1983, I was helping a friend move out of our shared apartment. She had this big comfy chair that had been a royal pain in the arse to get up the apartment's very narrow staircase, so to move it out I suggested we throw a rope around it and lower it over a small second-floor balcony at the front. I volunteered to do the lowering. It wasn't that heavy, so I was up there alone. I lifted the chair over the railing and started to lower it. After a second, I noticed that the chair's legs had caught on the balcony's slight overhang, so I put my thighs against the railing and swung the chair out.

Then the railing collapsed. I fell about 18 feet, but God intervened that day, because the chair landed on its side and I landed, ass down, on the chair's arm. It broke my fall. I still bounced off and landed on the ground knocking myself out. I have no memory of the actual fall, but one of my friends who witnessed it said I did a perfect swan dive. I also have only fragmentary memories of the next hour, and that was only when I moved or was moved by the paramedics.

The Sublime Art of Frederick Wiseman

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Documentaries couldn't be more popular than they are today and one of the best at capturing a diverse range of subjects (and he's been doing it for years) is Frederick Wiseman.

The Truth is Out There: Frederick Wiseman's La Danse

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/04/truth-is-out-there-frederick-wisemans.html

These days, documentaries that tend to get commercial release are usually one of three kinds. There are the docs that feature the director as star, notably the films of Michael Moore (Capitalism: A Love Story,Sicko) and Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?). There are the documentaries that really prove that truth is indeed stranger than fiction (Capturing the Friedmans,Crazy Love, Grizzly Man). There are the docs that are tied into current societal concerns and issues (An Inconvenient Truth, Food Inc., The Cove). And then there’s Frederick Wiseman.

Riffing on Noir

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Yesterday we ran a piece that looked at some of the key themes of film noir. Today we post a piece Steve Vineberg wrote for Critics at Large about a musical tribute to the genre.

Musical Noir: City of Angels

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/11/musical-noir-city-of-angels.html

Burke Moses (center) stars in "City of Angels" at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam

City of Angels is one of the smartest and most literate of modern musicals, though on Broadway in 1990 the production values upstaged Larry Gelbart’s book and the Cy Coleman-David Zippel songs. The show, which Michael Blakemore directed, was such an expensive-looking commodity that it came across as smug, a kind of exclusive club for well-heeled Westchester and Long Island theatergoers. I admired the performances, especially of the two leading men, Gregg Edelman and James Naughton, but it wasn’t until I saw it in a physically pared-down community-theatre edition a few years later that the virtues of the play and the score shone through. At the intimate Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut, where it’s currently being mounted with the loving care typical of this venue, you can revel in those virtues.

For No Reason At All

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

One of the most enticing aspects of film noir is how fate plays such a huge hand in determining the outcome of lives that go down roads to perdition. When Kevin Courrier was doing a lecture series on film noir, he wrote this piece to accompany the program.

The Wrong Men: Innocents in Noir Nightshade

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/02/wrong-men-innocents-in-nightshade.html

One of the cornerstones of film noir is the inevitability of fate. The deeper fear being that despite your best intentions, or your honest nature, bad things will happen to you – for no reason at all. That is, for no reason that is consciously intended. In Fritz's Lang's spiraling nightmare The Woman in the Window (1944), Edward G. Robinson's meekly self-effacing Professor Richard Wanley entertains his erotic fantasies gazing at an oil portrait of Alice Reed (Joan Bennett) in a storefront window. But when he suddenly meets Reed, in the flesh, on the street, his fantasies begin to have true consequences. After killing Alice's lover in self-defense, Wanley finds himself being pursued by Heidt (Dan Duryea), an ex-cop with blackmail on his mind. It also doesn't help that Heidt was the dead man's bodyguard. Suddenly, the milquetoast professor is stewing in primal juices he'd only dabbled in with his imagination.

Walking Amongst Us

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

With the American election now in full swing heading towards November, it seemed appropriate to run a piece by Susan Green on the 1988 science-fiction thriller They Live! with all its current political implications.

Fiendish Slumber Party: A Movie About Perpetual Shut-Eye

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/07/fiendish-slumber-party-movie-about.html

A scene from John Carpenter's 1988 film, They Live

For many fans, the lasting value of They Live is rooted in silly, macho one-liners like “I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass – and I’m all out of bubble gum.” Others enjoy John Carpenter’s 1988 sci-fi thriller because it so perfectly nails how the purveyors of pop culture, commerce and politics long ago sold their souls to the devil. Well, not Satan exactly, but amoral Masters of the Universe who control humanity by promoting greed, ignorance and apathy. In the cult film loosely adapted from a Ray Nelson short story, Eight O’Clock in the Morning, these demonic forces are actually ghoulish extraterrestrials disguised as mainstream Americans – some critics have dubbed them Young Republicans – walking amongst us.

Love Ain't For Keeping

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

We might get many romantic movies in the theatres these days, but how long has it been since there's been a really substantial love story? A couple of years ago David Churchill defined what he means by substantial love story in this post from Critics at Large.

The Troubling Nature of Love: Before Sunset & Sideways

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/07/troubling-nature-of-love-before-sunset.html

No two films about the troubling nature of love better bracketed the latter half of 2004 than Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset and Alexander Payne’s Sideways. Both films, long available on DVD, are worth watching again over a rainy weekend in August (if we have one), because both are without question masterful if not masterpieces.

Both expertly deal with ‘damaged’ people trying to find their way through pain, depression, self-loathing, what-have-you, to that place where they can let themselves be loved again. Both also happen to be deeply moving and painfully funny. The fact that one of them, Before Sunset, happens to be a sequel to the tiny, perfect Before Sunrise (1995) is just the icing on the cake.

Clued In & Clueless

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

What happens when a concept for a game becomes a concept for a film, designed only for movie theatres, finds itself on home video? Andrew Dupuis ventured forth in this short Critics at Large post two years ago to ponder the effect.

Whodunit!: Clue: The Movie

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/05/whodunit-clue-1985.html

Thank goodness for videotape. After watching Clue: The Movie (1985) for the first time this past weekend I find myself conflicted, not unlike a guilty man pleading innocence before an unforgiving jury of his peers. On one hand I found myself thoroughly enjoying the cavalcade of familiar faces, Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, Martin Mull etc., chewing up the scenery, while on the other hand I couldn't help but think about how much I would have despised the film if I'd caught it during its original theatrical run.

Jonathan Lynn's film used an interesting advertising tactic to raise curiosity; he offered viewers three different endings which would be equally distributed and randomly attached to every film print. Surprise! The problem with this tactic is that with any other film it would promote repeated viewings but by the halfway mark in Clue you should realize that this film's conclusion will prove somewhat irrelevant. It never really mattered if it was Colonel Mustard in the observatory with the candlestick or Ms.Scarlet with the knife in the kitchen. Being offered one of three endings gave the impression that ‘whodunit’ was a question we cared to have answered. We were being told a joke for an hour and a half but the filmmakers missed the punch line. No wonder most critics panned it and its box office numbers were lackluster upon its initial release.

Cruise Control

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Since Tom Cruise and his divorce from Katie Holmes has been dominating the news lately, it seemed appropriate to examine Cruise as a movie star and actor (rather than husband). Shlomo Schwartzberg performed the deed for Critics at Large two years back.

Tom Cruise’s Film Career: Nice Try But No Cigar

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/06/tom-cruises-film-career-nice-try-but-no.html

Knight and Day, Tom Cruise’s latest movie, which opens today, is a reminder, once again, of how he simply can’t hold up his end of the bargain when it comes to creating a charismatic, gripping character on screen. Up against a talented actress like Cameron Diaz he is particularly lost. Cruise, in fact, is the Energizer Bunny of Hollywood. You admire his efforts to act, but it becomes quickly apparent he’s really not getting anywhere acting.

His work is not the flop sweat of a generally bad actor like Jude Law (Closer, Sleuth), where you can feel his failure on screen. It’s more a case of someone who tries gamely to turn in a good performance but only occasionally succeeds in doing so. His callow, unformed persona sometimes suits his roles (Risky Business, Jerry Maguire, Mission: Impossible), which is when he rises to the occasion, but usually it only serves to showcase his limitations as an actor (The Last Samurai, A Few Good Men, The Firm,Far and Away, Rain Man, The Color of Money). Except for the aforementioned good roles, Cruise also mostly chooses bad films to star in. Whether playing a harried father (War of the Worlds), a futuristic cop on the run (Minority Report), a troubled bloodsucker (Interview with the Vampire) or a disabled Vietnam War vet (Born on the Fourth of the July), he rarely makes any lasting impression. His overly self effacing manner negates any personality he could bring to his part, rendering him a blank slate. This may explain why so few critics nail Cruise for his non-acting. They obviously read into his performances what they want them to be, not what they actually are. (Meanwhile a talented, albeit uneven actor, like Keanu Reeves (Speed, Devil’s Advocate) routinely gets grief for all his supposed ‘bad’ performances, no matter what he does. Go figure!)

Crossing Over

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

The technology of movie-making is changing so dramatically and quickly (from film stock to digital) that it has naturally caused both debate and alarm. While there are many good reasons to consider what this change will do the quality of the image, there are already some directors taking all of this into consideration in their recent work. A few of those examples, all good ones, caught the attention of Kevin Courrier in Critics at Large.

Our Waking Dreams: Movies in the Digital World (Hugo, The Artist, & The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo)

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2012/03/our-waking-dreams-movies-in-digital.html

While watching the Academy Awards this year, I was struck by an ongoing motif that seemed to run throughout the evening. Often it was impacted in the periodic jokes of host Billy Crystal, but I could also detect it in the asides by various presenters. There was a constant reference to the early origins of cinema being made just when technology has dramatically transformed the art form – and continues to do so at warp speed. Not only could a viewer detect some concern over whether the technology would come to diminish the quality of the dramatic material, the nominated movies seemed to embody the very argument that was at the heart of the show.

When I was growing up the only way you could watch movies was when they opened in theatres. Movies on television were limited then and they were often burdened by commercials. The limited window of opportunity that theatres offered you to see the picture was partly what built your enthusiasm and anticipation in going to the movies. If the picture was really good, you feared that once it abandoned the movie house you might never get to experience it again. (Part of what got me interested in collecting movie soundtracks was so I could listen to the dramatic score and evoke my favourite scenes from the film.) It was also true that when you saw something really bad, you got worried it might disappear from your city before you had a chance to try it again to test your first reaction to it. 

Hands Across the Water

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Making a television show about a television show is nothing new. Neither is the great cultural divide between Britain and the United States. But Mark Clamen saw something new and boldly funny about Episodes, a TV show that felt raised the bar in the depiction of that cultural divide.

Showtime’s Episodes: The One Where the Brits Get Shafted by Hollywood

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/03/showtimes-episodes-one-where-brits-get.html

Some of the biggest news in TV this winter (long before Charlie Sheen began his distracting antics) was the return of some old Friends to the sitcom world: Matthew Perry on ABC’s Mr. Sunshine and Matt LeBlanc’s on Showtime’s Episodes. Since I’ve already weighed in positively on Mr. Sunshine, today we’re taking a look at Episodes.

Episodes is far more than a Matt LeBlanc comeback vehicle. Co-produced by Showtime and the BBC (and airing simultaneously on both of sides of the pond), Episodes tells the story of Sean and Beverly Lincoln (former Green Wing co-stars Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Grieg), a British husband-and-wife writing duo whose BAFTA-award winning TV series is optioned by an American network. The 7-episode first season takes place over a period of only a couple of weeks, taking us step-by-step from the couple’s disorienting arrival in Hollywood to the end of the filming of their show’s pilot. This slow corruption of the Lincolns’ professional integrity is mirrored in the concurrent decay of their relationship. The two are compelled to make compromise after compromise in the production of their show, including being forced to (mis)cast Matt LeBlanc (credibly played by Matt LeBlanc) as the show’s lead. Within hours of landing in L.A., their show’s title shifts from “Lyman’s Boys” to “Pucks!”, transformed from a genteel, if biting, boarding school comedy about an aging headmaster with a wistful crush on a middle-aged, lesbian librarian into a middle-of-the-road romcom-sitcom about a hockey coach wooing the school’s young, sexy, and very heterosexual librarian.

Tamsin Grieg and Stephen Mangan

Taking on show business from the inside raises the bar considerably for a comedy series, and so Episodes gave itself a steep hill to climb. (The gold standard will always be HBO’s The Larry Sanders Show, but Ricky Gervais’ much more personal approach in Extras comes in a close second.)  But even if making a TV show about making a TV show is as old as television itself, Crane and Klarik do bring something new to the table: the dramatization of the difficult translation of a successful UK series into the very different culture of American TV. In that sense, it could hardly be timelier. In the very same week that Episodes first aired, 3 US versions of popular UK shows premiered: Skins (on MTV), Being Human (on SyFy), Shameless, which aired immediately following the first episode of Episodes on Showtime itself. As each of these shows struggles in its own way to translate very popular (and still on-going) British series for an American audience, Episodes offers a dark and satirical look behind the scenes at a comparable, if fictional, effort. If you’ve ever seen a favourite UK series be painfully adapted to the US network model (NBC’s limp re-creation of Steven Moffat’s Coupling comes to mind), Episodes is definitely a must-see.

Kathleen Rose Perkins and John Pankow in Episodes

For one, Episodes certainly knows its sitcoms: it was created by the writing team of David Crane (co-creator of Friends) and Jeffrey Klarik (writer and co-producer of Mad About You). Together, Crane and Klarik also created the short-lived CBS sitcom The Class in 2006, and in many ways, this new cable series is their revenge on the network meddling that led to that show’s cancellation after one brief season.  And no doubt it is possible to read the entire series as a one-note screed against executive tampering with artistic output, but intentionally or not, the show offers some nuance in that regard. On the one hand, Merc, the president of the American television network that buys “Lyman's Boys” and played to the hilt by John Pankow (Mad About You), is an irredeemable louse: he is crude and immature to the point of pathology, and utterly lacking in taste or any appreciation for the medium of television. But on the other hand, the changes to the Lincolns’ show come from primarily from the LeBlanc’s mostly well-intended meddling. And (whatever we are supposed to believe of the quality of the fictional pilot by season’s end), the suggestions LeBlanc makes are more often right than wrong. For example, his argument for why the object of his character’s affection shouldn’t be written as a lesbian is actually quite compelling, pointing to the fact that – ironically – the US network norm of a 22-episode season actually may impose narrative limitations on a series, when compared to the traditionally shorter runs of a UK series.

The 3rd I

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Sometimes making art is more than a matter of choice. It can be a necessity. Susan Green wrote about one such artist, Wafaa Bilal, for whom making art is essential. So much so, he makes himself into the work.

Looking Within and Without: An Experimental Artist

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/02/looking-within-and-without-experimental_15.html

The back of Wafaa Bilal’s head, for The 3rd I.

The tiny digital camera has been removed from the back of Wafaa Bilal’s skull.

Let’s allow that image sink in for a moment.

OK. The 44-year-old Iraqi, an assistant professor of art at New York University, is a creative provocateur. For an entire month in 2007, for example, visitors to his website were able to splatter him with a remote-controlled paint gun and watch as he tried to dodge the yellow-colored attacks while sequestered in a small room at a Chicago gallery. The piece was titled Domestic Tension. In the anti-Arab fervor still sweeping the country after 9/11, many strangers gleefully wielded this symbolic Internet weapon of personal destruction.

But Bilal’s latest project, called The 3rd I, surely ranks even higher on any pushing-the-cultural-envelope meter. At the end of 2010, he had a waterproof titanium plate inserted in his head. That made it possible to magnetically attach a camera that could transmit photos minute-by-minute to the notebook computer he carried at all times, a process the world could observe online. (On campus, he agreed to protect the privacy of students and faculty with a lens cap.) But, recently, his body began rejecting part of the apparatus, which caused constant suffering despite the steroids and antibiotics he took in hopes of solving the problem.

Groovin'

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

For some listeners, music is a pastime where just about anything on the radio can fill the dead air. For others though, like Kevin Courrier, music became a significant part of discovering who he is.

A Whole Wide World Within the Grooves

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2012/02/whole-wide-world-within-grooves.html

When I was four, I developed a promiscuous interest in music. Without understanding the meaning of the first songs I discovered, such as Frankie Laine's romantic confession "Moonlight Gambler," or Marty Robbins' fateful ballad "The Hanging Tree," I was drawn by the unusual texture of the sound in those tunes. Laine, a hyperbolic performer, used a number of strange effects in his song. A high-pitched whistle, drenched in echo, opened the track; to my young ears, that whistle seemed to be forlornly signalling to some distant train arriving into a lonely, abandoned station. It was soon followed by another voice making click-clop noises, as if a majestic horse were coming over the hill to intercept that oncoming train. And all of this was taking place before Frankie Laine opened his mouth to sing. It was clear that I was responding to more than just a song – to a whole other world of sound reverberating around me, creating a spot in my imagination, inviting me to share in the music's distinctive peculiarities. But these were my parents' and my relatives' records. I didn't really discover rock 'n' roll until my mother's cousin, Jimmy Mahon, came to live with us in 1959.

Globalization Blues

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

There's been a big controversy brewing in the United States over the fact that the U.S. Olympic Team's opening day clothing is made in China. Curiously, a similar tempest was stirred up during the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver when the Hudson Bay Company came under the same scrutiny over the same issue with the Canadian Olympic Team which David Churchill addressed at the time.

Canada - Made in China

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/02/canada-made-in-china.html

This is a slightly odd piece for Critics At Large, but I think it has relevance because what we are dealing with is the Vancouver Olympics and the promotion of Canadian patriotism through clothing. Except the things they want us to buy to make us feel good about ourselves and our country were not made here.

This issue began awhile ago with wine. Vincor, a major wine company that owns wineries such as Inniskillin and Jackson-Triggs, became one of the corporate sponsors of the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver. They released their first commemorative Olympic wine about 18 months ago, and the shit immediately hit the fan.Instead of releasing a wine that was made with British Columbia grapes, they instead slapped the label on one of their "Cellared in Canada" wines. Cellared in Canada is a series of wines made by several Canadian wineries that allows them to import wines in bulk from countries such as Chile. The percentage can be anything from 70% in Ontario to 100% in BC. The only requirement is that the wines are indeed 'cellared in Canada', but contain little or no local wine. Long story short. When these commemorative wines were released, the wine press and regular media went into a frenzy, attacking Vincor for not releasing a VQA BC wine (VQA is Canada's appellation system that guarantees the wines come from the region stated) as their 'Olympic' wine instead.

Dressing Wounds

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

It's been over a decade since 9/11 but political discourse in the United States remains divisive and rancorous, often fuelled by paranoia. But drama can sometimes best address the lingering wounds that continue to fester beneath the surface, as Steve Vineberg pointed out in his review last year of Hanging Out With the Apple Family.

Hanging Out with the Apple Family

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/10/hanging-out-with-apple-family.html

Sweet and Sad at the Public Theater in New York City/Photo by Joan Marcus

Sweet and Sad is the second in a series of plays written and directed by Richard Nelson that sets a family living in Manhattan and the Hudson Valley against the political backdrop of contemporary America – specifically the Democratic north east. That Hopey Changey Thing brought together the Apples – Richard, a Manhattan lawyer; his sisters Barbara, Marian and Jane; their uncle Benjamin, who lives with the unmarried Barbara; and Jane’s actor boy friend Tim Andrews – at Barbara’s house in upstate Rhinebeck during the 2010 mid-term elections. Sweet and Sad takes place on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and ends with the same group leaving Barbara’s to attend a local memorial concert at which Benjamin, who is also an actor but who has been suffering from amnesia following a heart attack, will be reading Walt Whitman’s Civil War poem “The Wound-Dresser.” These are intimate, small-scale pieces that attempt to accomplish something that seems to be increasingly difficult in the American theatre: to depict three-dimensional characters responding to the political realities of present-day life without preaching or striking attitudes, using their relationships as a dramatic structure for reflecting their feelings.

Playwright Richard Nelson

In That Hopey Changey Thing Nelson, a thoughtful, intelligent playwright whose plays, even the best ones (Goodnight Children Everywhere, Rodney’s Wife, the musicals My Life with Albertine and James Joyce’s The Dead), tend to fly under the radar, resists the temptation to wallow with his educated New York-born liberal characters in the dire condition of the American political climate. The title makes you fear that you’ll get a tirade on Sarah Palin (the phrase is a Palin quote) and the Tea Party – so easy to write, it seems, that there’s almost no way to avoid smugness. But Nelson is too smart for that. Instead the conflict isn’t between the characters and red-state America – which would be no dramatic conflict at all – but between the two elder Apple sisters and their brother Richard (Jay O. Sanders), who has been working for Governor Cuomo and has begun to become more conservative, or at least less inclined to join in with the usual liberal chorus. What Barbara (Maryann Plunkett), a high-school English teacher, and especially Marian (Laila Robins), a second-grade teacher, see as defection is Richard’s quarrel with the easy assumptions of the culture they’ve all grown up, his revulsion at the speed with which everyone they know demonizes the right wing, falling back on the excuse that “they’re worse.” Jane (J. Smith-Cameron), a non-fiction writer who, like Richard, lives in New York City, is his quieter confederate; in an unstated act of rebellion against the monolithic New York reaction to the right wing – and against the deterioration of American political discourse – neither of them has voted on this day. Ingeniously, Nelson uses the sibling tensions as a way of exposing these political tensions.

The Artist as Celebrity

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

One of the many ways a sharp critic can illuminate a subversive artist's work in a retrospective, as Amanda Shubert did in the Cindy Sherman show at MoMA from earlier this year, is to examine how (and if) they can keep that subversion alive over the course of a long successful career.

 

Disappearing Act: Cindy Sherman at MoMA

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2012/05/disappearing-act-cindy-sherman-at-moma.html

"Untitled #92" - Cindy Sherman, from Centerfolds, 1981, chromogenic color print

The Cindy Sherman retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, organized by Associate Curator Eva Respini and on view through June 11, surveys 35 years of work by a master of postmodern photography. Throughout her career, Sherman has steadily mined photographic portraiture for its feminist subversions of how we look and what we take for truth. Her pictures are performances: with the exception of two mid-career series, all of her photographs are portraits of herself in disguise, reflections on gender and stereotype, voyeurism and fantasy, in the era of Hollywood and mass culture. From her groundbreaking Untitled Film Stills, the series that launched her career in the late 1970s, to her 2008 society portraits, Sherman has distinguished herself as a kind of ventriloquist of image and identity, for whom popular and consumer culture are not the subject of her works but the raw material of her perpetual self-transformation.

Julie Taymor & The Bard

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Not everyone is a huge fan of Shakespeare's The Tempest (in the way people are fond of King Lear for instance), but when Julie Taymor directed the most recent film version, it created a whole other tempest for writer Shlomo Schwartzberg.

Waterlogged: Julie Taymor's The Tempest

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/12/waterlogged-julie-taymors-tempest.html

Helen Mirren and Felicity Jones in The Tempest

In the Shakespearean canon, The Tempest, reportedly his last written play, stands out as one of his weakest works. It’s essentially a simple tale about Prospero, the former Duke of Milan, who’s been exiled to a deserted island for over a decade with his daughter, Miranda. As The Tempest opens, by use of magic, Prospero has stranded his enemies – who usurped his post – and some others, on various parts of the island. There, they endeavour to make their way back to civilization even as Prospero instructs his child on life and love, and commands the resentful half-man/half-monster Caliban and the loyal sprite Ariel to torment their reluctant guests. It all builds to, not a climax, exactly, but a mild confrontation between the parties concerned, and then a flat and dull happy ending. Slapdash, superficial and thin, The Tempest, even when staged well, as it was at Stratford this past summer (see my review here), cannot surmount its many failings and shortcomings. But when you let a talentless filmmaker like Julie Taymor (Titus, Frida) tackle the project, the results are considerably worse.

Chris Cooper and Alan Cumming

Taymor, attempting to put her own stamp on the play, has given The Tempest a sex-change and a feminist veneer. Prospero is now Prospera (Helen Mirren), an alchemist, who after her husband, the Duke of Milan, died was accused of witchcraft and, only through the efforts of her loyal retainer Gonzalo (Tom Conti), managed to escape certain death along with her daughter, Miranda (Felicity Jones). The island is still the setting of choice, but it’s Prospera’s brother, not the Duke’s male sibling, Antonio (Chris Cooper), who is instrumental in her exile. The rest of the characters, including Naple’s King Alonso (David Strathairn), his son Prince Ferdinand (a dull Reeve Carney) as well as Caliban (Djimon Hounsou) and Ariel (Ben Wishaw) are the same as in the original.

Director Julie Taymor

Casting Mirren in the lead is not the problem with The Tempest. I generally prefer Shakespeare played straight, but revisions to the Bard, as was evident in Kenneth Branagh’s frequently brilliant 19th century update of Hamlet (1996), can succeed on their own merits. And Mirren, of course, is a huge talent, who would not and does not disgrace herself in the role of Prospera. The film’s difficulties have much more to do with a director who cannot settle on one tone – the film veers erratically from low comedy to high drama to fantastical sequences and back again – and has not the faintest idea of how to build a coherent story to save her life. (Comparatively, Paul Mazursky's Tempest (1982), his lame modern take on the play, was at least tonally consistent.) It doesn’t help that Taymor, who also scripted the film, is working with inferior source material, a fact that only serves to highlight her inadequacies behind the camera.